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4 Install The SSH Server

If you didn't install an SSH server during the basic system installation, you can do it now:

apt-get install ssh openssh-server

From now on you can use an SSH client such as PuTTY and connect from your workstation to your Debian Squeeze server and follow the remaining steps from this tutorial.

5 Install vim-nox (Optional)

I'll use vi as my text editor in this tutorial. The default vi program has some strange behaviour on Debian and Ubuntu; to fix this, we install vim-nox:

apt-get install vim-nox

(You don't have to do this if you use a different text editor such as joe or nano.)

6 Configure The Network

Because the Debian Squeeze installer has configured our system to get its network settings via DHCP, we have to change that now because a server should have a static IP address. Edit /etc/network/interfaces and adjust it to your needs (in this example setup I will use the IP address 192.168.0.100) (please note that I replace allow-hotplug eth0 with auto eth0; otherwise restarting the network doesn't work, and we'd have to reboot the whole system):

7 Update Your Debian Installation

First make sure that your /etc/apt/sources.list contains the squeeze-updates repository (this makes sure you always get the newest updates for the ClamAV virus scanner - this project publishes releases very often, and sometimes old versions stop working).

vi /etc/apt/sources.list

[...]
deb http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/ squeeze-updates main
[...]

Run

apt-get update

to update the apt package database and

apt-get upgrade

to install the latest updates (if there are any).

8 Change The Default Shell

/bin/sh is a symlink to /bin/dash, however we need /bin/bash, not /bin/dash. Therefore we do this:

dpkg-reconfigure dash

Use dash as the default system shell (/bin/sh)?<-- No

9 Synchronize the System Clock

It is a good idea to synchronize the system clock with an NTP (network time protocol) server over the Internet. Simply run